Description

You are the last living member of your ninja clan after they were brutally slaughtered. Now, you seek to exact revenge on the evil shogun responsible.

The Last Ninja is an action/adventure game set in medieval Japan. The game is shown in isometric view, and the eponymous ninja can walk in four directions, jump, fight the enemies and collect necessary items on his way.

While fighting, the ninja can use several different blows and block. There are a couple of weapons to find, including smoke bombs and shuriken.

Forums

Trivia

Cancelled ports

The Last Ninja was advertised and previewed in most major Sinclair ZX Spectrum magazines. The game ran into a number of problems and System 3 ended up developing and releasing Last Ninja 2 instead for the Spectrum. In issue 54 of UK gaming magazine Crash it is claimed that the first game was half finished. The game (or possibly its follow-up) was also being ported to the Tandy Color Computer 3, and even mentioned in Tandy's catalogues. The project facing difficulties, Steve Bjork was called in to help before the game was finally canceled. As a recently recovered development version shows, the CoCo port was already at an advanced state when it was scrapped. For information and pictures, refer to Allen Huffman's site.

Delayed port

In 1988, Marc Rosocha had an conversion of Last Ninja ready for Atari ST and Amiga computers. But this was not released until 1990 with Ninja Remix, with featured extended graphics and was completely programmed from scratch.

Game Art Beyond

In 2018, Last Ninja was selected as one of the biggest classics on the Commodore 64 by the creators of the C64 graphics collection Game Art Beyond. Last Ninja was honoured with a high resolution title picture in a special C64 graphics format called NUFLI, along with a new interpretation of the Last Ninja (Level 1) theme.

Awards

Computer and Video Games

May 1988 (Issue #79) - Golden Joystick 1988 Award: Runner Up category Game of the Year